George McDonald

George has taught the Toyota Production System (TPS) or “lean” manufacturing to companies all over the U.S. for 15 years. He began his “lean” career in 1992, when he was the first American operations consultant hired at the Toyota Supplier Support Center (TSSC) in Lexington, KY; an organization created by Toyota with the sole mission of assisting North American companies in implementing TPS. George gained invaluable TPS expertise from some of Toyota’s top experts from Japan. While at TSSC, George managed numerous U.S. supplier companies in their transformation from traditional manufacturing systems to complete JIT systems.

For the past 10 years, George has continued to teach this expertise to companies as Principal Consultant and partner in his consulting firm, Lean Manufacturing Solutions, LLC. He has supported companies that are extremely varied – from small companies to Fortune 100 companies, in the automotive, furniture, heavy equipment, medical equipment, and film/paper/chemical industries.

In his years at LMS, he has found that many “lean” consultants are primarily teaching kaizen events and Kanban implementation. While this is beneficial to manufacturing process improvement, kaizen and Kanban are only two elements of TPS, and will provide only limited success. These elements alone do not leave a company with a sustaining lean system in place, which should be the ultimate result of a company’s investment.

In contrast, George’s approach is to support companies in implementing TPS in its entirety; by beginning with establishing stability in the processes, to ultimately achieving Just-In-Time through the pull system and heijunka, thus completing TPS. His goal is to leave companies with a lean system that they can continue to operate independently and that provides unending lean achievements and benefits.

The ability to implement all TPS elements as an entire system, is what sets George McDonald apart from other consultants, and provides companies with the lasting results that they should expect from their investment in a consultant.

George resides in North Carolina and divides his time supporting focused industrial training within the state and supporting lean projects throughout the US.